Our poet laureate was among the first to record, though with great tact, that the ash cloud had a glorious silver lining. "Britain's birds sing in this spring," wrote Carol Ann Duffy. Is she busy this weekend? Though the hateful plane traffic is back, there remains a pressing need for a poem, preferably on the epic scale, recognising nature's achievement of something else we had come to believe was impossible: the silencing of Michael O'Leary. Even now, in parks and gardens all over the country, the only sound is the cheering and hosannas of Ryanair survivors, including those previously too traumatised to speak.

Have not the days following O'Leary's reluctant capitulation to European law recalled a more innocent time, when travellers still enjoyed the right to free tap water, or indeed to be pushed along in a wheelchair without paying for the inconvenience this causes to Ryanair operatives who are thereby forced to break off from fining and insulting able-bodied passengers? This, surely, is life as Shakespeare must have known it. On the other hand, as the airport expert and philosopher Alain de Botton argued, in a week that, you might think, comprehensively disproved the claim that it is better to travel than to arrive, suffering is largely the point. "We come from a tradition of pilgrimage," he told Newsnight, "and pilgrimage is a way of travelling where you try to make it difficult for yourself because you feel there's a benefit." Happily, the Pope will be here soon, to commence Mr O'Leary's long journey towards canonisation. Meanwhile, from the same perspective, the lack of aeroplane seats is still doing numberless holidaymakers a tremendous spiritual favour.

Yet another of Eyjafjallajökull's silver linings, at least from the government's point of view, was its arrival at a time when so many potential troublemakers were already held captive in this country, most commentariat leave having been cancelled for the election. Given the fuss of which alpha male talent is capable, when delayed in a congested Stansted airport, or denied its favourite pair of underpants, it is hard even to conceive of Gordon Brown's difficulties had prominent broadcasters been simultaneously stranded (as volcano-relief parlance has it), in Easter holiday hellholes such as Venice, Bali and Marrakech. There was relief, too, at the BBC, where Jana Bennett was discovered to be still in the country.

Still abroad, however, were enough stranded travellers from all parts of the media to tweet, blog or file answers to the big question, posed by one: "How fast can heaven become hell?" In New York – useful packing tip, this, for anyone planning a trip – Chris Moyles soon ran out of deodorant. In Milan, Kevin Marsh, head of the BBC's journalism college, looked on the bright side: "The one thing I have is resource." In Oman, hotel guests were reduced to rinsing their own underwear, and even, driven by the human instinct for survival, to scavenge illicit rolls from the breakfast buffet.

In the circumstances, it is a miracle that Stanley Johnson got home without being eaten. As we know, since the BBC celebrated his historic return with a re-enactment of Chay Blyth's entry into Portsmouth, Mr Johnson had been busily threatening wildlife in the Galápagos islands when the volcano, perhaps in revenge, threatened resumption of his duties as Boris's father.

Returning home, via Madrid and, in the absence of flights, a ferry from Santander, he was one of several hundred Britons whose arrival at the port coincided with that of an amphibious landing ship, HMS Albion, there to pick up troops trying to come home from Afghanistan. Cognisant of the alternative – a full fare from Santander – Mr Johnson hailed his rescue as a "mini-Dunkirk". "If the volcano had made life difficult for people like my wife and me," he wrote, "spare a thought for our soldiers in Afghanistan."

His was not the first major challenge to public compassion. The failure of fellow Dunkirk expert Dan Snow's mercy mission after he announced it on Twitter had also indicated that expectations of public sympathy might, among some affluent holidaymakers, outstrip what was actually available. Snow Jr said he was "really upset" that his thwarted passengers would have to wait for ferries, due to an inexplicable enthusiasm on France's part for securing her national borders, even from his emergency inflatables.

Were conditions in Calais such as to justify exceptional measures, including the deployment of navy vessels to evacuate multitudes of sturdy tourists, as well as a number of more vulnerable ones? At first, the absurd Brown encouraged the idea. The Mail pointed out that our warships were, after all, just sitting around in the sea, "circling uselessly". Maybe it would win the approval of that paper if, in the next election debate, Nick Clegg proposed that these relics from a different world order be decommissioned and placed on tourism stand-by, ready to fill with plucky Johnsons the next time holiday heaven turns into hell?

There can have been few more compelling demonstrations, in recent years, of the importance of resilience, a terrifically fashionable concept that thinktanks now try to apply to everything from national readiness for emergencies to the ability of poor people to cope with financial difficulties. Insofar as a non-wonk can grasp it, resilience means the ability of a system or person to cope with setbacks. Some progressives think it should be taught in schools. Last week, in a paper about the BNP vote, the Institute for Public Policy Research concluded that the party is least popular in places that are resilient and most popular where people are not resilient. Richmond is resilient. Barnsley isn't. (Haiti even less so.) The hope is that resilience can be acquired, even though, obviously, not everyone can share Richmond's advantages of employment, education and health. "People who are employed," the IPPR has noted, generally "have access to more resources than those who are unemployed". These resources, such as confidence and wealth, can be drawn on "in a time of shock or crisis".

Among hardier ash-victims, for instance, finances combined with health, ingenuity, family and a sense of empowerment (another resilience indicator) to help when the authorities would not. Kevin Marsh plotted his escape from Milan in a taxi ("I settle on €750") and groups of fleeing skiers organised joint escapes. "We have just arrived home after a €2,000 taxi ride from Courchevel in the French Alps," was one of many tales of resilience posted on the BBC website.

Resourceful, but less affluent young tourists could also deal with adversity, running to the front of queues and tweeting for help. Meanwhile, days after these survivors exhausted the public's interest in spreading ash, impoverished passengers were still camped out at distant airports where available tickets were going first to travellers with the resilience – or cash – to pay. One woman described a most un-Bottonian "dog-eat-dog atmosphere", among tourists competing for seats at Bangkok airport. Lessons will certainly have to be learned from this. But let us hope they are not in resilience.